Overview:  Strong Angel II is the name of a capabilities demonstration to be held in July 2004 near Kona, Hawaii. The event is designed to encourage the development and evaluation of tools designed for humanitarian information collection and use within an austere environment. We're particularly interested in proposed solutions that cross the civil-military boundary gracefully and reliably during a post-conflict reconstruction.

Within the five days of the demonstration we will pursue problem identification, proposed solution development, a site demonstration, user interaction and opinion, and a rapid evaluation of our successes and failures. We'll then document, to the limits of our resources, what we found and make it all available here.

Background:  Months in Iraq supporting humanitarian operations across the civil-military boundary revealed shortcomings in capabilities for which there seemed to be both an obvious and persistent need and some readily available answers. Despite significant efforts on the part of many involved, a large percentage of those shortcomings persisted well after the war, and some remain to this day.

This demonstration will address a few of those issues present in Iraq during April of 2003 by establishing a humanitarian informatics site in a remote and austere environment within the Rim of the Pacific 2004 Operations Area during July of 2004. Within that collaborative civil-military site we will demonstrate capabilities within the following topic areas:

Problems to address:

1. Demonstration of Machine-Translation tools in Arabic
2. Demonstration of collaborative tools appropriate for civil-military support
3. Demonstration of remote communications capabilities appropriate for both civilian and military use within an austere environment
4. Demonstrate a proposed Information Zone capability
5. Demonstrate Logistics support through collaborative tools defined for Iraq
6. Demonstrate iterative Humanitarian Assessment collection and analysis on world standard indicators
7. Demonstrate simultaneous and collaborative GIS functionality across at least three  nations.
8. Demonstrate open-source application effectiveness for micro-entrepreneurship.
9. Demonstrate resilient, robust, and sustainable techniques for remote habitation
10. Demonstrate a responsive collaborative framework for disaster response.

The methods we'll use to address these problems can be found under the "Tasks" folder on the menu to the upper left.

Eric Rasmussen, MD, MDM, FACP
Commander, Medical Corps, US Navy